Rare British Columbia algal bloom seen from space

Thursday, August 25, 2016, 2:11 PM - NASA satellites spot immense British Columbia algal bloom, Sun-watching STEREO-B calls home after nearly 2 years, and SpaceX installs an incredible new lawn ornament. It's What's Up In Space!

Immense algal bloom chokes the Strait of Georgia

Most often when the topic of algal blooms comes up for somewhere in Canada, it's usually referring to the lower Great Lakes, especially Lake Erie. Now, however, an algal bloom has developed on the far side of the country, in a place where it hasn't been seen before - in B.C.'s Strait of Georgia.

Strait of Georgia algal bloom, as imaged by NASA satellite, from August 15-24, 2016. Credit: NASA Worldview

Nicky Haigh, with B.C.'s Harmful Algae Monitoring Program, says that she has never seen a bloom like this before in the Strait of Georgia.

Despite the sickly look of the water, however, Haigh says that this particular species of phytoplankton - known as coccolithophore - is harmless to us.

The problem with many of these blooms is the damage they can do to the marine ecosystem, usually through consuming all the nutrients or all of the oxygen in the water they're inhabiting. This turns out to be self-limiting for the bloom, but it also endangers fish and other aquatic creatures that live in those same waters.

As for the cause, algal blooms typically develop when large quantities of nutrients flow into the water. High nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations are what spark coccolithophore blooms, and these tend to end up in the water from agricultural runoff.

NASA finally reaches lost twin, STEREO-B

Twin satellites, named Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory - Ahead and Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory - Behind (STEREO-A and STEREO-B, for short), have been orbiting around the Sun since they were launched in October of 2006. With STEREO-A leading Earth in its orbit and STEREO-B lagging behind, these two would eventually work their way around to the other side of the Sun, to give scientists here a look at was going on there. This would help space weather forecasters keep track of sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections that would be blocked from our view here on and around Earth.

The positions of STEREO-A (red) and STEREO-B (blue), on the far side of the Sun from Earth, as of August 2016. Credit: NASA

The mission was performing extremely well, until October 1, 2014, when STEREO-B suddenly fell silent. Ironically, the fault that caused the loss of communication was a hard reset the spacecraft was testing - a special contingency for when the spacecraft had not heard from Earth for a period of 72 hours.

NASA spent the past 22 months trying to reestablish contact with STEREO-B, and on August 21, 2016, it finally responded!

The NASA team will now assess the spacecraft, to ensure that everything is working. Hopefully, it can return to duty with STEREO-A soon!

SpaceX's awesome new lawn ornament

Back on December 21, 2015, following the launch of the ORBCOMM-2 satellite, SpaceX landed one of their Falcon 9 1st-stage booster rockets on dry land, at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This was an amazing feat, and has led to several more successes since then (so many that SpaceX was running out of space to store their recovered boosters), and plans are now in the works to send one of these recovered rockets back into space.

Not that first one, though. It was destined for a special place of honour, and it took up residence there just this week.

Still bearing some of the scorch marks from its journey to space and back, the rocket has been mostly cleaned up and is now installed as a flagpost in front of SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

According to Universe Today:

Getting it to stand again was no easy task, and required two days and two cranes! The rocket also underwent some “aesthetic renewal” before being erected, which included a cleaning in order to remove all the soot it had accumulated on re-entry. Its logos were also repainted, and most of its engines were replaced by spent versions.

Stay tuned in September or October, when SpaceX will perform their very first launch using one of these recovered booster rockets - specifically the one that launched and landed on April 8, 2016, after delivering the CRS-8 Dragon cargo vessel into orbit for a rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Sources: CBC | NASA | Universe Today

Watch Below: SpaceX finally does it, lands rocket back on Earth